Customers

What is Weekly Active Users (WAU)?

Weekly Active Users (WAU) is the number of unique users who engage with a product at least once within a 7-day period. It sits between daily active users and monthly active users as a measure of engagement frequency, often used for products with a natural weekly usage rhythm.

TL;DR

Weekly Active Users is the number of unique people who used a product at least once in a 7-day window, a middle-ground engagement measure for products people naturally use on a weekly rather than daily rhythm.

Formula

WAU = Count of Unique Users Active in a Trailing 7-Day Period

Why It Matters

Weekly Active Users matters because it fits the natural usage pattern of many products better than daily or monthly measures do, since tools like project management software, weekly reporting dashboards, or planning apps aren't meant to be opened every single day, but shouldn't sit unused for a month either. Tracking WAU alongside DAU and MAU also reveals engagement patterns that either extreme would hide on its own, since a healthy WAU with a low DAU to WAU ratio might simply reflect a product's natural weekly rhythm rather than a genuine engagement problem. Comparing how WAU moves after a feature launch or product change is also one of the clearest ways to see whether that change is actually pulling users back more consistently.

Example

A product logs 45,000 unique users engaging with it at some point during a given week. If that number climbs to 52,000 the following week after a new feature launch, while daily active users barely move, that pattern suggests the feature is drawing existing users back more often within the week rather than attracting large numbers of brand-new users, a distinction that comparing WAU against DAU and MAU over the same period helps clarify.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • DAU counts unique users active in a single day, MAU counts unique users active over 30 days, and WAU sits between them, counting unique users active over a 7-day window. Each is useful depending on how frequently a product is naturally meant to be used.

  • There's no universal target since it depends entirely on the size of the total user base and the product's natural usage rhythm. It's most useful tracked as a trend over time and alongside the DAU to MAU or WAU to MAU stickiness ratio.

  • Products that aren't designed for daily use, like weekly reporting tools or planning software, would show a misleadingly low DAU even when engagement is genuinely healthy. WAU better reflects real usage for products with that kind of natural cadence.

  • A drop in WAU can signal users churning entirely, a shift toward using the product less frequently than weekly, a bug or friction point discouraging return visits, or seasonal changes in usage patterns depending on the product.

  • Most product and growth teams track it continuously on a dashboard and review the trend weekly, watching especially closely after any product change or feature launch to see whether engagement patterns shift.